The onboarding experience can decide whether your relationship with a customer will be short-lived or a long one. While onboarding is a way to guide your customers to your offering, effective onboarding introduces a user to relevant product features seamlessly and makes headroom for greater retention and revenue in the future.
However, there are some common mistakes that businesses make when onboarding customers, which leads to user drop-outs at initial stages.
Here are a few critical gaffes that businesses must avoid:
1. Not keeping your word: When customers come onto your platform, they have a certain expectation you may have set earlier. While your pre-sales and marketing may have done a great job at bringing the lead to your platform, divergence between the copy and the real experience can be frustrating for the customer. Ensure that you only promise what you can deliver and you deliver what you promise when you onboard the customer.
2. Process Friction: As mentioned above, onboarding is a process of introducing a new customer to your offerings gradually. Suppose you onboard customers digitally, and you have screens that are not exactly necessary in the overall flow. This can result in friction and lead the customer to drop out without completing the process. For lowering this friction, minimize the information you ask from a client and automate as much as possible so your customer can quickly finish the onboarding process. Before asking for or displaying any information or screen, ask yourself, “Is it truly a must-have for the onboarding flow? Is it meaningful enough for my customer to answer or see this?”
3. Overwhelming the customer: You may be excited to portray what your product can do all at once. But, bombarding a new user with too much information can be overwhelming. In the age of information overload, the last thing you want to do is clutter your screen with unnecessary information that irks the user. Instead, introduce only what the customer came for.
4. Slow or no engagement: It is essential to communicate with the customer, especially during the onboarding process. New users may have queries about navigating your platform. Although most of it may be addressed by having a simplified process flow, there is always a chance that a new customer may have questions. Arrange for adequate and quick support in this case. This may also improve your chances to earn some brownie points with the customer right from the onboarding stage.
5. Slow load times: There is nothing more frustrating during onboarding than waiting for the next screen to load. If your product has delays loading, the customer is going to quit the onboarding process mid-way and develop an undesirable opinion about your business as a whole. Your top-most priority should be to value the customer’s time and fire up your platform with optimal speed, not only during onboarding but across processes.
A lot goes into delivering a great onboarding experience for customers. Perhaps, developing a good understanding about your customer and anticipating their needs can go a long way in retaining them. Further, following some good practices and avoiding making these critical mistakes can help make a lasting impression.
Perhaps, leveraging automation through customer onboarding APIs can lift the load off organizations when signing up new customers. In particular, banking and financial institutions can benefit from such automation, given the high level of compliance norms they are required to adhere to.
Companies like Perfios are offering customer onboarding APIs that allow complete automation of the onboarding process, minimizing inputs and TAT and saving both time and costs for businesses.
Financial institutions using Perfios’ customer onboarding APIs can benefit from single-input onboarding flows and processes that adhere to all regulatory norms such as KYC compliance, as required by RBI and other regulatory bodies.
Contact us to know more about how you can automate your onboarding processes.
About us:
Perfios is the largest data, analytics, automation, and decisioning solution provider to FIs, catering to the entire lending lifecycle from onboarding to diligence & monitoring to collections. Perfios solutions enable systemic fraud prevention, risk management, compliance & automation through superior data engineering and deep tech applications.
In a nutshell, Perfios stands on the trifecta of digitization: automation, enhanced diligence, and robust decisioning for straight-through processing; thus, creating a state-of-the-art digitization process without compromising on security and quality. Perfios is a pioneer in the services it offers and has successfully acquired a very diverse portfolio of 300+ live clients, spanning across the largest gamut of use cases in the industry.
